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Sure, The Artist did well at the Academy Awards. But what does that really mean, statistically?

As usual, our friends at AddThis, a company that provides social media sharing tools for web publishers, tracked their network of 11 million sites and 1.2 billion unique users per month to find out which Oscar events really drove chatter among consumers.

The data show that the real Oscar winners were the iPad, Pinterest, Sacha Baron Cohen and Twitter. Losers included Ryan Seacrest, Facebook and Billy Crystal.

This was the background chatter in the weeks prior to the Oscars. Note that ‘Hugo’ dominates.

Demian Bichir peaked when he was nominated for a SAG award for ‘Better Life.’ But interest faded. More people were interested in George Clooney than Jean Dujardin of ‘The Artist’ in the week before the Oscars.

Prior to the show, the people’s choice for Best Actress was Viola Davis, not Meryl Streep.

If Kenneth G. Lieberthal were anything but a China expert at the Brookings institution, his travelling-in-China security procedures would read like the product of a paranoid mind that watched too many spy movies as a kid:

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

Talk about overkill, right? Well he’s not alone. The Times reports that these seemingly paranoid precautions are par for the course for just about anyone with valuable information including government officials, researchers, and even normal businessmen who do business in China.

But what about the rest of us? I may not have any valuable state secrets or research that needs protecting but that doesn’t mean I want the Chinese government snooping on my internetting when I visit my grandparents (especially when the consequences can be so severe). In the past, I’ve relied on a combination of VPNs, TOR, and password-protecting everything I can, but now it sounds like even that isn’t enough. Or maybe it’s totally overkill given my general unimportance in the grand scheme of things. Dear readers, I ask you, how much security is enough when it comes to the average person on vacation? [NY Times]

Amazon just kicked off a new TV campaign for the Kindle Fire, which it doubtless hopes will further dent sales of Apple’s iPad. But Kindle has a long way to go before it starts threatening the iPad as a device for serving online ads to consumers.

Data from Rimm-Kaufmann Group, an online marketing agency, show that the iPad maintains its total dominance of the tablet market when it comes to ad traffic. Kindle is slowly making progress, but it only has 3.48 percent of the market to iPad’s 88.1 percent.

iPad had a 93.44 percent share of the market late last year, so share is being traded quickly in this category.

With iPad 3 on the way, even those small gains for Kindle may be in jeopardy.

When it comes to ad performance, the iPad also has a significant edge. If you index the data to the average ad displayed on a desktop computer, ads on iPad get 10 percent more revenue per click, the same level of overall clicks, and a greater average order value.

All the other tablets, including Kindle, perform much worse than ads displayed on PCs.

iPad dominates ad traffic on tablets, but its dominance is slipping.

The Kindle is gaining share of ad traffic the fastest against the iPad.

But the iPad is still the most effective tablet device by far, for advertisers.

By now, we’ve become accustomed to the circus of elite advertising that takes place during America’s biggest game, and this year was no exception. Last night’s Super Bowl made room for over 50 commercials during its air time, some of which included the likes of Samsung’s whopping Galaxy Note, the usual Go Daddy domain teasers, a bit of Best Buy “innovation” and the Hulu Plus Mushy Mush campaign, just to mention a few. Needless to say, we put together a small collection of some we believe you might enjoy, so take a virtual jump past the break to catch the big-ticket advertising in action. You can also find the rest of the ad pack at the source link below.

According to the latest research from the NPD group, Apple has got its second wind in smartphone sales. In the same quarter that saw the iPhone 4S reinvent the wheel obey our every vocal whim, the trio of available models soaked up a total of 43 percent of the US smartphone market in Q4 2012, apparently knawing away at Android’s market share of 53 percent held during the rest of 2011. However, Google’s mobile OS appears to be the debutante smartphone of choice, cornering 57 percent of new purchases, with 34 percent going for Apple. The remaining 9 percent is distributed between the smartphone also-rans, with the likes of Windows Phone and BlackBerry languishing in that anonymous grey bar at the top. The top five handsets from NPD’s Mobile Phone Track service is an Apple and Samsung love-in, with iOS devices claiming the three top spots, followed by the Samsung Galaxy S II (we assume collectively) and the Galaxy S 4G. NPD’s blow-by-blow commentary on this increasingly two-horse race awaits below.

In 2011, manufacturers shipped 487.7 million smartphones and only 414.6 million computers—that’s desktops, laptops and tablets. Combined. We’d heard prophecy of this day, and now it may have arrived.

The study by Canalys has troves of data about global smartphone sales, which seem to lend credence to the theory that smartphones are becoming the main computing devices of the masses. Creation and productivity tasks aside, the vast majority of what we need to do or obtain from the internet can be accomplished on a $100 device that fits in our hand. And they’re becoming near-ubiquitous.

For the rest of the stat geekery, check out the full report if poring over data about product shipments is your thing. [Canalys]

Google can now look at what you’ve been doing on YouTube, Gmail, and Google+ to suggest search results and “more relevant ads.”

Google can take information you provide on your Google Profile, including your name and photo, and use it on all your other Google products like Gmail — and can replace past names you used, so you’re the same on all sites.

Google will collect information from your mobile device, including your phone number, and associate it with your Google Account.

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account. In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.

What a difference a few years makes. Four years ago, Apple analysts fretted over iPod shipments and computer sales when an earnings call rolled around. All the early chatter is now focused on whether surging iPhone and iPad sales will even be enough to meet soaring expectations.

The iPad, only a rumor two years ago, accounted for 24% of revenue last quarter. The iPhone, meanwhile, has jumped from 10% of revenue at the beginning of 2008 to 39% last quarter–and nearly 50% at the beginning of last year. With the tablet market still in its infancy and huge opportunities still available in mobile, the shift in Apple’s revenues has only just begun. All of which should futher underline the changing nature of their business: Apple is essentially a mobile computing company.

Which is not to say the rest of the company isn’t growing. Mac shipments were up 20.7% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, according to Gartner–even as the rest of the PC market fell 5.9%. It’s just that they have not kept up with the astronomic growth of the company’s mobile products.

Luxury watches are not just functional wristwear–they’re works of art with hundreds of years of technology packed inside.

Consumers’ tastes and shopping preferences for watches are evolving around the globe.

Market research company Digital Luxury Group has just released its annual report on the worldwide market for high-end watches, looking at 15 of the world’s biggest haute timepiece brands ahead of Baselworld, the upcoming international watch and jewelry show in Switzerland.

The report is based on more than a billion consumer searches for luxury watches on search engines including Google, Bing and Baidu.

For the first time in 2011, demand for luxury watches was higher in the US than in China, based on internet search market share.

Within China, more than half of demand for luxury timepieces comes from first- and second-tier coastal cities with high-end shopping streets, like Beijing and Shanghai.

Heritage brands like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin are more popular with traditional clients from Beijing, while IWC attracts a younger, trendier, urban audience.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.